Elijah of Buxton (by Christopher Paul Curtis)

Elijah is the first child born in freedom in the Buxton settlement for escaped and freed slaves in Canada. Though he has certainly heard his elders talk, he has never experienced slavery directly. Instead, he has a good life, is getting a solid education, goes fishing, and lives with his loving family in their own home.

His closest experience of slavery has been the occasional rumors of slave catchers in the area, and when newly escaped slaves arrive at the settlement. That is, until the money Mr. Leroy was saving to buy the rest of his family out of slavery is stolen. Then Elijah, feeling partly responsible, agrees to cross over to America to try to get it back.

Includes Author's Note on Buxton, a real place, now an historic site.

In Christopher Paul Curtis' award-winning debut, The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963, he firmly established the style that serves him so brilliantly in ELIJAH OF BUXTON. This is another first-person narrative, in vivid dialect, by a winningly naive child loaded with personality. Both books have a delightfully funny first half (some of the humor a bit off-color perhaps, but very true to the narrator's age and personality) and a powerfully moving historical event in the second half -- in this case, slavery -- made more powerful by the familiarity the reader has with the characters it will impact.

Despite one of the more hideous dust jackets in recent memory (you might want to remove the dust jacket before recommending it to a child), this wonderful, moving novel is sure to become a staple of discussion groups in schools and libraries across the country. Curtis' signal contribution to children's literature is his creation of novels that address important historical issues and events in an emotionally powerful, intellectually challenging, compassionate way, yet are simply rollicking good fun as well.